Ancient Greece

In ancient Greek, logos meant 'word', but this meaning gradually extended to include other concepts such as speech, thought, reason, principle and logic. In the Platonic school of philosophy, Logos became the principle of unity, order and reason within the universe, and later came to refer to a kind of subsidiary god or divine force, an emanation of the deity.

The word Logos entered Hellenistic Judaism under the influence of Philo, an Alexandrian Jew, as a paraclete or emanation of his God. In Quaestiones in Genesi II.62 Philo called the Logos a "second God" who is subordinate to the Supreme God. At the same time, Philo also sought to maintain monotheism by asserting that the Logos is not really distinct from God. Eventually, the concept of Logos entered Christianity, with Jesus as the Logos or Word.

For centuries the tales of the Trojan War were sung by the bards. As these bards (rhapsodes) made up their performance (along the general theme) as they went along from a collection of stock phrases they memorised, each bard not only delivered different versions from the other, but also each of their own performances was different.

After syllabic writing was adopted in Greece in the 8th Century BCE, versions began to be written down. The most popular one was the one attributed to Homer 'the blind poet of Chios'. Whether the tradition is fact, whether Homer was indeed an individual - the individual - or represented a group or series of bards, is unknown, however it is convenient to simply use the word Homer, even though the stories were delivered for hundreds of years before about 725 BCE when 'Homer' is considered to have been recorded.

The text we have today is considerably different from then. Ancient sources comment on the endless versions and variants which came into circulation in the following centuries. Peistratos, tyrant of Athens two centuries later, commissioned a team of scholars to try to purify the texts. It is indicative of the licence taken in even this apparently noble endeavour that it became a joke in Athens that this 'purified' text was perverted to support Athens' case in the current dispute it had with Megara over the ownership of the island of Salamis.

Some misguided scholars even today work on the holy grail of trying to retrieve the 'original' text which of course never existed as such.

The sea Battle of Salamis was fought between an alliance of southern Greek city-states and the Persian Empire in September 480 BCE in the strait between the mainland and Salamis, an island in the Saronic Gulf opposite Athens.

It marked the high-point of the second Persian invasion of Greece which had begun in 480 BCE.

In an earlier attempt to destroy the Persian fleet, which threatened the Greek cities in the Peloponnese and so kept their armies at home instead of uniting against the Persian army, and to expose the Persian sea supply line to closure, the Greeks decided to hold the Persian land advance at the Thermopylae pass and so force the Persians to engage in a sea battle to continue their advance. If the Persian fleet was destroyed, they could not supply their army or threaten the Greek cities, which would allow them to assemble thir full power against Persia.

Unfortunately for the Greeks, the Persians had the best of the sea battle, and they had to withdraw their fleet. As there was now no reason to hold the pass, it was abandoned.

The Greek fleet reassembled in the Strait between Salamis Island and Athens on the mainland. By a ruse they persuaded the Persians that they were going to flee through the western end of the strait and so the Persianns split their superior fleet in two to seal off the imagined escape route. This evened up the numbers of ships on both sides, and when the Persians came through the Strait, they were further split by an island in the middle of the Strait, giving the Greek fleet local superiority. The Persian fleet was defeated and the remnant took refuge across the other side of the Aegean Sea, leaving the resupply line unprotected. The Persians, unaable to feed the army through the oncoming winter, sent half of it home.

In the following summer, without the Persian amphibious threst to their cities, the Greeks were able to concentrate their armies at Plataia and defeat the remaining Persian army and its Greek allies. Simultaneously the Greek navies eliminated the remaining Persian navy at Mycale. Athens then led an anti-Persian alliance, which was based on the Athenian navy, making Athens dominant and effectively creating an Athenian empire which remained dominant until destroyed by a coalitiom of a Spartan-led Greek cities with Persian support 70 years later.